The principal contribution of the Russian physicist Pavel Alekseevich Cherenkov (1904-1990) was the explanation of a certain pale bluish radiation as a consequence of high-speed electrons passing through refractive mediums.

More is known about the Cherenkov effect than about Pavel Cherenkov himself. He was born on July 28, 1904, into a poor peasant family living in the village of Novaya Chigla, Voronezh Province. At the age of 20 he entered the State University of Voronezh, graduating 4 years later. In 1930 he was accepted as a postgraduate student at the P. N. Lebedev Institute of Physics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Cherenkov earned his doctorate in 1940.

As early as 1910, Marie Curie had noticed that radium salts dissolved in distilled water produced a bluish glow, but she did not pursue this observation further. During the late 1920s a French scientist, L. I. Mallet, examined the spectrum of the bluish-white radiation and discovered it...